Hosting requests suspended

Free webhosting is a victim of its own success.

RCGroups free webhosting has grown beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, to the point where, as many of you have noticed, the sheer quantity of traffic is starting to negatively affect the quality and availability of the service.

We have approximately 700 accounts. Even though we don't offer full support, just the management of so many accounts has become an issue, not to mention the bandwidth clogging. Some tightening up needs to happen mainly so we can justify continuing the service.

For now, I have disabled the form that sends new requests.
We will continue to run the service for existing accounts, and
we will deal with requests that are already in the queue.

That is an option being considered. If we end up charging it will be reasonable and hopefully only for sites with higher bandwidth requirements. I would still like to offer free or almost free hosting for small personal sites.

I hate to say "I told ya so" but when the service first started a lot of us said "how can you do this", knowing full well it would grow very quickly. My own vote is that webhosting bandwidth become more limited if the page is free, and that any postings of video clips that increase bandwidth over a nominal amount gets charged. I think the bandwidth is very easily eaten up by a single posting of a video on a popular forum.

I also think that webhosting should become more self-service. Turn this group into a help group, as most of the changes people need to make to their pages are simple and not the responsibility of the webhosting moderator. Those of us who have done this before are more than happy to help folks through the setup process. Essentially folks should be able to set up their own pages, point the DNS servers etc. on their own or should be able to find the answer by searching here. No negative points for flaming people for not searching!

Please, please, please do whatever you can to keep free hosting in some form! (oh, and access to the incredible server maintenance tools, this has been an avenue for learning all on its own) Thanks!

Maybe look at the guys using the feature and no credit given. Videos, forums, etc. etc. and no rcgroups mention that I can see.

Some sites are obvious repositories for videos only. No home page no credits given. I don't think that was the intent.
Other services ban that type of use. If you are going to just feed videos or store files, they have no time for it.

alternative plan

It seems to me many members are overlooking the gallery. If all you want is a place to host videos, https://www.rcgroups.com/gallery is a better place to do that. It comes with some free storage space and some very handy organizing tools for any registered rcgroups member, and if you need more space you can upgrade to a paid rcgroups membership. Once you get your videos up there, it is OK to link to them from elsewhere if that's what you want to do.

A lot of the so-called websites on rchomepage aren't websites at all. Many of them are just some video files. I'm going to be asking all such people to move their stuff to the gallery. So if you are one of those people, consider yourself asked already. You will be getting an email shortly.

Countdown

I'd like 100 accounts that just park videos to move to the gallery. Then I'm opening up the request hosting form again. Zero so far have moved. I'll update this as the numbers go up. If you know anyone who should move, nudge them.

Here here, anyone who is using this free webhosting just to dump videos is taking the rise, I am very happy with the fact that you guys are generous enough to offer free webhosting in the first place and I put it to good use (I hope) by creating a website people could visit.

I mean whats the point of having webspace if your not actually going to create a website?

We are obviously all very much grateful for the possibility to have a free webhost and I'm sure most of us wouldn't mind to donate some money or pay a reasonable fee in order to upgrade and maintain the existing hardware.